Trying out themes for their debate tomorrow, the US presidential candidates swung at each other over Iraq on Monday, with President George W. Bush mocking Senator John Kerry as indecisive under pressure and Kerry accusing him of "refusing to come clean with the American people."
"It's been a little tough to prepare for the debates, because he keeps changing his positions, especially on the war," Bush said at a rally in West Chester, Ohio that the Secret Service said was his biggest of the year, with 41,000 people passing through metal detectors to enter Voice of America park.
"I think he could spend 90 minutes debating himself," Bush said.
Kerry used a campaign forum in Spring Green, Wisconsin to portray the president as a man who blithely proclaimed success even as employment fell, the deficit soared, the number of Americans without health insurance climbed and, perhaps most dangerous of all, the situation in Iraq deteriorated.
Invoking former US president Harry Truman's memory and his saying, "The buck stops here," Kerry said Truman would be dismayed to see that "we have a president who, no matter what the issue, no matter what the choice, he refuses to come clean with the American people."
Bush's gibe fit into the Republicans' unrelenting portrayal of Kerry since his first days as the presumptive Democratic nominee, as a flip-flopper. Kerry's comments reflected his camp's recently ramped-up efforts to undermine Bush's credibility and portray him as the opposite of a flip-flopper, rigid and unwilling to adjust to the consequences of bad decisions.
With the debate on foreign policy nearing, the campaigns traded advertisements on Iraq that underlined their main lines of attack.
The Bush campaign's spot, scheduled to run in 16 markets, features clips of Kerry making various statements on Iraq, several sharply edited to be starkly contradictory. After juxtaposing several -- like Kerry's saying he supported the president's decision to disarm for-mer Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and then, "I don't believe the president took us to war as he should have" -- the ad asks, "How can John Kerry protect us when he doesn't even know where he stands?"
The Kerry spot, which campaign aides said would run in parallel markets to the Bush commercial, begins by highlighting several of Bush's statements on Iraq and moves to Kerry's four-point plan to end the conflict.
"George Bush said Iraq was `mission accomplished,'" a narrator says, referring to the banner on the carrier Abraham Lincoln where Bush stood in May last year, to declare that major combat was over, something he said this week he would do the same way again.
"Sixteen months later, he still doesn't get it. Today over 1,000 US soldiers dead, kidnappings, even beheadings of Americans. Still Bush has no plan what to do in Iraq. How can you solve a problem when you can't see it?" the narrator says.
In southwestern Ohio, Bush spent the afternoon on a bus tour through a largely Republican swath, luring hundreds of supporters to small towns like Xenia, where the First United Christian Church billboard said, "Give God What's Right, Not What's Left."
Some Democrats also lined the route, like a woman on Route 72 with the sign saying, "Let's Give Bush His Pink Slip."
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